Something about “Part, Part II”
seemed kind of ridiculous.
First, party. In the sense of a
party of people, it showed up in
the fourteenth century,
but back then it meant a part/section/portion, which is not something we really
use anymore. From there it evolved to a party, as in a group of people, and it
didn’t mean a party you throw for fun until 1716 (it wasn’t a verb, like to
party, until 1922, which… yeah, that sounds like the 1920s). As for its
history, party comes from the
Old French
partie, which meant a part or
portion, like party originally did in English. Its verb form is
partir, to divide, from the
classical Latin partire/partiri, which means
to share ordivide.
That’s related to
pars,
part in
Latin, which we talked about last week and is from pere-.
Next, partner showed up in the
fourteenth century, although back
then it was spelled
partiner, which
was also spelled
parcener. That comes
from the Old French
parçonier,
partner, from
parçon, partition or
portion, and that’s from the classical Latin
partitionem, which, you know,
partition.
Partition itself showed up in the fifteenth century as
particioun, from the Old French
particion,
which is another descendant of partitionem, pars, and pere-. We can also throw
partisan in there, although it’s relatively newer, having shown up in the
mid sixteenth century. It’s from the
Middle French partisan, from the classical Latin
partem,
part,
which is again from pars.
There are also part words that have
dropped the T, like parse and parcel. Parse showed up in the
mid sixteenth century as a grammatical term. It comes from the
Middle
English pars, part of speech,
from the Old French
pars, which is
actually the plural of
part, which
means… part. And because everything about this one is super obvious, that pars
is from the Latin pars. In slightly less duh origins, there’s also parcel,
which showed up in the
late fourteenth century meaning a portion or part of something. Basically, it went from a part of
something, to a quantity of anything, to a quantity of goods in a package, to a
package. It’s from the Old French
parcele,
and before that the
Medieval
Latin parcella and
Vulgar
Latin particella. That’s from the
classical Latin
particula, another
word we talked about last week as being from pars and pere-.
How strangely sensible this one was.
Sources